My senior year of high school I played the lead role in our spring musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I’ll be the first to admit that it was one of my highest moments of dorkdom, but somehow I recovered to become the hip, suave person that I am now. Or not.
I’ve been thinking recently about one of the songs that I had to sing as the awkward and na?ve Charlie Brown. It’s the big finale song where everything gets tied together in a happy ending and all of the characters explain the lesson they’ve learned over the course of the show. The song goes on about how each character has discovered happiness in the small things in life, such as holding hands, pizza with sausage and tying your shoe. Charlie Brown’s part is about finding the dropped pencil of the little redheaded girl whom he has been swooning over for the entire show. The pencil has bite marks on it, which reminds Chuck that the girl he’s been afraid to approach for so long really is human. At the age of 17, the song seemed sweet and profound, and I bought into the idealistic notion that happiness can be wherever you look for it, and I tried my best to find joy in the simple things of my life.
But happiness for me wasn’t, and to some degree still isn’t, that simple-I’ve trained myself to seek happiness in any situation and to accept what makes other people happy, to the point where I no longer know what I want to make myself happy. And it happens to be easy to have my happiness based on how happy other people are with me. Case in point: Choosing a college. I thought I would be happy at Georgetown because it made other people happy that I would be there. Georgetown made lots of people excited, and so it naturally (to me) became the right thing to do. No one was forceful about it-that’s the weirdest part, no one ever explicitly told me what they wanted me to do, I just felt like I knew what they wanted for me, so I have no one but my schizophrenic self to blame. I hear stories of people whose parents planned out their kids’ lives from day one. My parents were never like that. They didn’t care if I became a doctor or a lawyer, a flight attendant or a garbage man, as long as I was happy. That makes the whole situation even more ironic: My parents were happy when I was happy, and I wanted them to be happy so that I could be happy. I put a wrench in that by not being able to figure out what I needed to make myself happy.
I made the best out of Georgetown. I can honestly say I like it here and have enjoyed most of my college experience. I’ve managed to be successful and find a community in which I can thrive, and I’ve done a lot of worthwhile things that have made me happy. But I still don’t know if it’s what I wanted, and I don’t know how to figure that out about anything, including Georgetown.
As I get ready to go through a similar process-this time finding a career instead of college-I have begun questioning myself again. I’m good at a lot of things, and I will be able to enjoy doing a lot of things, but I don’t know which of those things I want to do, and so I wonder at what point I’ll stop being happy doing them. There’s no one around this time to tell me what to do, so I’m left asking how I narrow down so many options into the one thing that I want to do for at least the beginning of the rest of my life. I keep thinking of the Charlie Brown song now because I need to find the redheaded girl’s pencil and have it reveal to me the secret of my happiness. Until that happens, I don’t know if I’ll really know what I want.
Christopher Trott is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. It’s been a pleasure.
